Comparing to its predecessor, Starcom Nexus: the worldbuilding isn't as good (the universe feels smaller and less desolate, and there aren't any enemies as creepy as the Phage), but the exploration itself is still just as engaging. Some quality of life improvements, but a few downsides (namely that landing on a planet basically mandates save scumming). Combat? There's one good change: you now have a button which automatically fires your plasma turrets at the nearest enemy, including target leading. But the rest of the combat changes are bad. Flak is now basically useless because it needs to build up "charges" which you manually activate, instead of just shooting at any incoming missiles on its own. And then it'll waste its shots firing in all directions instead of at the ordnance which you want to destroy. Missiles, in turn, do less damage and aren't as fun to use. The biggest crime is the removal of the Wave Motion Gun (or to use its proper name, the Axial Ultragun). That was the single most satisfying weapon in the entire game and it's gone. Its "replacement", the forward fixed cannons, are weak and weedy in comparison. Purely because of that, Unknown Space has less replayability for me than Nexus. The space battles are less fun. I'd still recommend this game, but not as much as the first one.
I don't normally like roguelikes. The last one I tried along this vein, Hypergun, I got fed up with. It's the lack of progress that got me. But that's much less of an issue here. You don't go in for one long run, the "campaign" is in different stages of a few short levels each. Fail one level and you're not kicked back to the very start, you can just redo it. That is a huge plus for me. The weapons feel good to use. Not that much punch on the wands, spells and staves - but that's expected. Magic isn't about cannon blasts. The "alchemy" weapons - guns and crossbows - do have that punch. The enemies, well, the one that stuck in my mind is the carrot. Yes. A carrot. A horde enemy which charges at you and tries to bite you. I found that hilarious. Something tells me that one of the devs was told "Eat your vegetables... or they'll eat /you/" as a child. It runs fantastically well. On my system (Ryzen 5600 with a weedy little Radeon 6500 XT), there's not a single frame dropped at 1920x1080 even at maximum settings. Only the annoying options (motion blur) are turned off. No crashes, no glitches, no instability, no bugs. The music, as others have mentioned, is also very nice. The combat music is frantic and high-energy, and the "peace" music for wandering the dungeons is oddly captivating (my favourite: the track called "The Eye of Midas" in the OST). The soundtrack was an instant buy for me. And finally, the jewel in its crown: a native Linux version. That's no longer unheard of, but neither is it common. Since my main system runs Linux, it's obvious why I'd consider this to be important.
The game is interesting enough. Twin stick shooter is how I'd describe its genre - though as others have mentioned, the field of view is very small and there's no way to zoom out. It was entertaining enough while it lasted. But no matter what I might say about the gameplay or the premise, there are several game-killing bugs. Others had an issue with a vital key card not existing. My problem was later on, where you need to use the drone to fly inside a vent. Swap to the drone and you can't control it. You can swap back, but the drone won't move. Leave the area and the drone flies fine. Go back in and it's stationary and disabled. And that's it. You're stuck. No more progression. It's like an old shareware game, where the first episode was free and served as a demo to entice you to buy the full game. Except that in this case, I bought the full game and only got the first part. I know I'm not the only one to have this problem. A quick web search found someone in Valveland who had this issue too. But it was ignored. So that's my advice to potential buyers: ignore this game in return. Spend your money on something that's not broken.
I can't actually say much about this game for one simple reason: the configuration options are nearly nonexistent. Key remapping is done through a pre-launch dialogue box and there's no indication as to what the options do. And very critically - at least for me - there's no invert mouse option. I've been using that ever since the first Quake and it's almost impossible for me to adapt to non-inverted now. Because of that, I couldn't even make myself start playing it. I've no idea what the gameplay is like. That's how much of a killer it is. Seriously. That's been an option for 28 years. How is it missing in something produced now?
A lot of other reviews said that this game is very Star Trek. It is. Lost in an unknown universe, you explore and shoot your way across the galaxy. The gameplay itself is a top-down space shooter, but unlike others in its genre there's a lot of "drag" - so your ship will come to a halt relatively quickly if you let go of the controls. That actually made the game easier for me to play. Combat? At the very start, it's not particularly good, but it gets better once you get missiles. Because every ship is made of separate components, destruction means that pieces get sent blown off into space and explode after a little drifting. That means that you destroy enemy ships piece by piece - or if you hit a critical joining segment, you can blow it in two. This all happens organically and it is very satisfying. It gets better when you acquire the Wave Motion Gun. Charge up a spinal mounted cannon, shoot a blinding bolt of energy (which illuminates *entire planets* as it passes by) and it either explodes half your target (low charge/strong enemy), explodes all of your target (high charge, strong enemy) or splits your target in two, explodes all the bits and keeps going afterwards (high charge, medium or weak enemy). This is INCREDIBLY satisfying. It's 2D, but it's some of the punchiest, most visceral starship combat I've ever had. And all because everything is made of separate destructible parts. Downsides? The ending. It happens. And that's it, it's all over with very little warning. No post-game exploration - if you want to go around the galaxy exploding things in your dreadnought, you need to load a save made before you Did The Ending Thing. It seemed like a very short game, but that could be because I was enjoying it so much and I never noticed the time passing.
TLDR: get it if there's a deep discount and keep your expectations low. The native Linux build of the game works great. There's a lot of promise in Planet Nomads. It's a mining/crafting/building/survival/exploration game, but in 3D. From what I know, there are several other games like that, but they're either Minecraft or on Steam only and therefore completely useless to me. So from that perspective, PN is unique. But. There are several caveats. The game is fundamentally incomplete - let's not mince words here. There's item storage, but it's clunky. There's automated item transport, but you have no way of filtering items and so you'll end up with a mash of everything everywhere if you make the mistake of wiring your mining rig up to your storage crates. Transport propagates through machines, so you can't even use that as a barrier. There's automated and infinite production for minerals and water... but no means by which you can set up an infinite production line. You have to go up to everything and manually enter items into a queue which will eventually run out and need to be set up again. And there's one critical resource (biomass) which can only be obtained by manually cutting down trees, in spite of everything else having an automated flow. Combat? Very unbalanced - by the time you finally tech up enough to build a rifle, you'll already have a vehicle. And it's so much easier to just get in your car and run over the enemies. They can't hurt you when you're inside and it'll never run out of "ammo". And none of this will ever change. The last update for the game was 4 years ago. One of the other reviewers mentioned issues getting it to work under Linux. My experience was actually flawless - so there *is* that on its side. I suspect their problem was the CPU - this game needs a lot of CPU grunt for worldgen. Graphics... not so much. I'm using a Radeon 6500XT with a Ryzen 5600 and it runs beautifully. Was it Debian's fault? No idea. I run OpenSuSE Tumbleweed.
First off, I'll admit my bias. I know the story of Harry Potter pretty well. The only other story found in Lego games that I know is Star Wars. So if I didn't enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean or DC Super Villains as much as this, that might be why. But that said, this one is by far my favourite of all the Lego games. Why? Firstly, the way in which abilities work here is different to a lot of the other Lego games, where only one particular (class of) character can destroy silver objects, where you need another to use telekinetic powers, or another to open locks. For this, most characters can do most things (provided that you've done enough of the main quest to get them). And I like that. Some things are gated (for instance, dark magic, goblin keys, Parseltongue, Weasley boxes, broken object repair), but most aren't. Especially nice given that one of the abilities (strength) is also available from an unlockable red brick. So you can take your favourite character and stick with them. And then there's the music. That's more due to the source material than the game itself, but I like the soundtrack a lot more than years 1-4. Sorry, John Williams. But I like the later films' music a lot more than what you did for the first four. It seems more fitting. The characters still talk in "hmm" and "ahh", which I actually prefer to the fully voiced games seen later on. Finally? Luna. She's not in the first Lego HP game. She is in this one. And she even /skips/ when she walks. I rest my case. As for the game's performance and stability? I haven't had any issues. I'm running it under Linux (using Wine, it's not native) and it's been flawless. No crashes, no glitches and solid performance. The strange corrupt lighting that I got when using Lumos in LHP 1-4 doesn't happen any more and the graphics are just prettier in general.
